[tex-live] TL2004: Technical problems and testing
Hans Hagen
pragma at wxs.nl
Fri May 7 19:10:55 CEST 2004
Hi Olaf,
>Given the amount of feedback I've had, I've mainly gone on my sense of
>what would be useful, usable, and (I think) comprehensible.
-)
>- Currently, the code distinguishes between writing to the terminal
> and log on the one hand, and other writes (\write) on the other.
just curious: is \write16 the same as \message, or will \write16 act as any
other write (which makes sense)
>- For writes to the terminal and log, isprint(3) function is used, and
> this is locale-dependent.
>
>- For \write, the setup is as follows:
>
> - By default, printable means printable ASCII, codes [32..127].
> This is Knuth's original definition.
>
> - Giving the -8bit option changes the default to make all characters
> printable.
>
> - In a TCX file you can specify a third value, to explicitly set
> a character as printable or non-printable. This is the way to
> make characters non-printable if -8bit is used as well.
>
> - The xord/xchr/xprn arrays are always saved in the format, for all
> engines except those in the Omega family. Thus, a TCX or -8bit
> given in INI mode sets the defaults for that format.
>
> - If a TCX is specified, it overrules whatever is in the format.
>
> - If -8bit is specified, it overrules whatever is in the format.
>
> - The \xchr, \xord, \xprn primitives are only available in encTeX.
brilliant!
>What I would like to do, is to use only three extensions: .fmt for
>formats, .base for bases, and .mem for mems. If we expect that
>multiple engines will want to use the same format name, we can use a
>construct like this
> WEB2CDIR = .;{$TEXMF}/{$engine,}//
>to get things sorted. I've come to the conclusion that this kind of
>occurrence ought to be rare, especially on systems using fmtutil, so
>even that may be overkill.
nice and extensible; it would -for context- mean:
../texmf/aleph/cont-en.fmt (cont-nl.fmt, cont-de.fmt etc)
../texmf/pdfetex/cont-en.fmt (cont-nl.fmt, cont-de.fmt etc)
../texmf/metapost/metafun.mem (mptopdf.mem)
which is fine to me. I need to be able to distinguis between engines since
the format name is kind of fixed for me.
(i need to patch texexec but that's no big deal; i guess that also the
-efmt switch will become -fmt then)
maybe use 'format' instead of 'fmt' so that the new method is stressed
>Having a single extension for formats would clean up some things, but
>I do not feel strongly about it. What I do feel strongly about is
>that we should either using a single extension, or have each engine
>use its own extension; at present we're doing neither as pdftex uses
>.fmt and pdfetex uses .efmt.
esp with combined engines in the end we will end up in problems; (there are
also tex variants like xetex on the mac, which use xfmt)
Hans
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